| Dragon | - | - | - | Dragon 23 |
Now why would anyone in his/her
right mind dig a dungeon in the
first place? The answer
is that they probably wouldn’t, but this is a game,
so we’ll ignore that. They
would use it mostly as a secure prison for
political enemies and other
flotsam and jetsam of the criminal world.
While the dungeon and its
castle may have decayed somewhat over
years of disuse, there are
often places even under castles in the 20th
century where someone could
be sealed and forgotten.
Bearing this in mind, dungeons
in D&D should have at least
a few
areas that resemble cells,
both to catch unwary adventurers (steel doors
that latch solidly when
they close, and the key is that pile of rust on the
table 20’ away) and to hold
high-level characters, removing them from
the campaign at least for
a reasonably long time. This system has two
advantages: First, you don’t
have the sort of emotional trauma that
occurs when a high-level
character bites the dust for the last time, since it
is always possible for some
intrepid band to go and attempt to free the
now-helpless superman; and
second, the cries of “Unfair” do not ring
so often as when you attempt
to polish off adventurers with Acts of
Gods, exploding dungeons,
and a couple of other things I have seen
frantic DMs use. Of course,
it’s best if you simply don’t let characters
become super-characters
in the first place, but it seems that every campaign, no matter how tough,
winds up with at least one of these
“Dungeon-busters.” Play
then tends to become a rather boring cycle of
bigger, nastier monsters,
which are killed off by the character and his
party, gaining him more
experience, making him more powerful, which
necessitates even bigger
and nastier monsters, and on and on. So, to get
rid of these thugs with
a minimum of violence, arrange for the character
to somehow meet up with
a very powerful person on your lower levels
(it helps here if your dungeon
has an active caretaker.) In some manner,
the super-character has
offended this person and is put in a permanent
holding cell. Often, just
to be chivalrous, the ruler of my dungeon offers
the character a chance to
escape by defeating his champion in single
combat —though of course
there’s no guarantee that he will honor his
end of the deal if the super-character
does win —evil snicker.
Do make certain that the
cell is escape-proof for the character concerned.
Don’t overlook such escape
possibilities as teleportation,
ethereal movement, astral
projection, etc. For example, my brother’s
wizard Elrohir required
a cubical 200 feet below the lowest dungeon
level, sealed with five
layers of true lead to prevent teleportation and
mental communication, and
reachable only by a shaft two inches wide
and with liberal quantities
of true lead around and above, through
which canisters of food
drop and air is blown. The shaft through which
he was brought into the
cell has since been blocked with around twenty
tons of granite interspersed
with thick sheets of lead. Such a prison is a
far better way of imprisoning
a character than even killing him, since
such a character typically
surrounds himself with patriarchs to bring him
back to life.
Good luck to all the fiendish
DMs out there — may the masonry in
your dungeon never crumble.